by Colin Wilson
Delia Bacon’s success was greater than she lived to realize; she had raised the question of Shakespeare’s authorship, and now many others took it up, including Emerson, Whitman, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry James senior. In England the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, read William Henry Smith’s book and became a Baconian.
In 1867 there came to light one of the most interesting and convincing pieces of evidence connecting Bacon and Shakespeare. A librarian commissioned by the Duke of Northumberland to examine manuscripts in Northumberland House came upon a folio volume consisting of twenty-two sheets folded double. It seemed clear that it had belonged to Francis Bacon – at least, it contained mostly copies of works written by him. Nine pieces remained in the folder, and there were probably more. The cover, headed “Mr ffrauncis Bacon”, also has the word “Nevill” written twice at the top. Just below this are the words “Ne vele velis”, the family motto of Bacon’s nephew Sir Henry Nevill. The script contains two different sets of handwriting, probably those of amanuenses – presumably Bacon’s. The cover contains a list which seems to be a table of contents – since it mentions a number of pieces which are actually in the folder, such as four essays by Bacon, “Philipp against monsieur” – a letter from Sir Philip Sidney dissuading the Queen from marrying the Duke of Anjou, “Speeches for Lord Essex at the tylt” – speeches by Bacon written for the Earl of Essex, and “Loycester’s Common Wealth” – an incomplete copy of Leicester’s Commonwealth. But the cover also lists items that were no longer in the folio, including Nashe’s banned play The Isle of Dogs, and “Richard the Second” and “Richard the Third”. And immediately above these Shakespeare titles: “By Mr ffrauncis William Shakespeare”.
In fact this evidence is less powerful than it looks at first. “Richard the Second”, while not actually banned, was something of a “sensitive” play, and Shakespeare had been obliged to omit some lines from the first quarto edition of 1597 (which is also the likeliest date for the Northumberland manuscript). When Essex rebelled in 1601 he paid for a special performance of Richard II, hoping that a play about a king who was deposed might inspire Londoners to join his insurrection. (It was unsuccessful, and he was executed.) The “sensitive” lines about deposition were restored in an edition after Queen Elizabeth’s death. Richard III was about the same sensitive subject, and may also have been regarded as dubious. As a Privy Councillor of the queen, and her legal adviser, it was Bacon’s job to study “sensitive” works – he had also read a work by Dr Hayward on Richard II which had “much incensed Queen Elizabeth”; Dr Hayward was committed to the Tower for treason, but Bacon told the queen the book was harmless.
So we may assume that the Northumberland folder originally contained several “banned” works on which Bacon had been asked to give an opinion. A closer look at the cover shows that the name “Mr ffrauncis Bacon” and “Mr ffrauncis” has been doodled several times perhaps by Bacon himself; Shakespeare’s name has also been doodled repeatedly. But a close examination of the manuscript shows that it is quite untrue to claim that someone has doodled “Mr ffrauncis William Shakespeare”. “ffrauncis” and “William Shakespeare” are on different levels, and the surname Bacon is written directly below “Mr ffrauncis” (with the phrase “your sovereign” written upside down between them). “William Shakespeare” is written directly above the titles of his two plays and obviously refers to them.
So, regretfully, the Northumberland MS must be abandoned as a proof that there was a closer connection between Bacon and Shakespeare than is generally supposed; all it proves is that Bacon had read Richard II and Richard III in the course of his duties as the queen’s adviser.
Thirty-one years after Delia Bacon’s book there appeared the most influential of all the works of the “Shakespeare heretics”, Ignatius Donnelly’s The Great Cryptogram, Francis Bacon’s Cipher in the So-called Shakespeare Plays. Donnelly was an American congressman, famous for Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, which is still regarded as a sourcebook by those who believe in the existence of Plato’s sunken continent. But in the vast two-volume work on Bacon he tried to prove that Bacon had hidden ciphers about himself in the plays of Shakespeare, to prove his own authorship. (Bacon was in reality fascinated by ciphers.) After years of studying the plays and trying out every possible key to the cipher he finally began to perceive such obscure messages as: “Seas ill said that More low or Shak’st spur never writ a word of them”, meaning, according to Donnelly: “Cecil said that Marlowe or Shakespeare never writ a word of them.” The book inspired thousands of cranks to seek for “ciphers” in Shakespeare and other famous authors, and provoked a few wits and satirists to demonstrate that almost any sentence can be rearranged to produce astonishing messages – Ronald Knox wrote a delightful essay proving by this method that Queen Victoria was the real author of In Memoriam, describing herself, for example, as “Alf’s pen-poet”.
Another Baconian who was convinced that Bacon concealed his identity under various ciphers and anagrams was Dr Orville W. Owen of Detroit, who finally extracted a long message in blank verse from the plays, and found that it ordered him to cut up all the works of Bacon and Shakespeare into separate pages and stick them around the outside of a wheel. Owen used two wheels, and a thousand-foot strip of canvas that passed around them, with the pages stuck on to it. By incredibly complex reasoning, he extracted more codes from this dismembered text, and used it to extract the information that Bacon was really the son of Queen Elizabeth and her lover the Earl of Leicester; Hamlet was written as a personal attack on his mother, who retaliated by sending Bacon to exile in France. . . . The cipher also revealed that the Queen had finally been strangled by her chief minister Robert Cecil. The deciphered material also informed Owen that Bacon had concealed vital manuscripts proving his authorship in various boxes hidden near a castle at the confluence of the rivers Severn and Wye. Owen and a band of faithful followers spent fifteen years searching the countryside in the region of Chepstow (where there is a ruined castle). They dug dozens of holes and tunnels around the castle, and even under the river Wye, but eventually had to admit defeat. Another party hired boatmen to take them up and down the river, looking for hidden flights of steps that might lead to secret chambers. To the armchair student of human eccentricity, it all sounds marvellously funny; but the people who wasted their fortunes and their lives on this wild-goose chase must have felt that it was closer to tragedy.
In fact, anyone who takes the trouble to read a biography of Francis Bacon will see why it is impossible that he could have written Shakespeare’s plays. Their characters are utterly different. The author of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night is obviously a kindly and good-natured human being; it is easy to understand why his friends referred to him as “gentle Shakespeare”. No one would have called Bacon gentle. He was a man of immense intelligence who was permanently dissatisfied with himself and with his lot in life. He was driven by the most superficial kind of ambition: “political power is what I want, power over men and affairs”. He was a calculating, rather heartless man who believed that successful men should learn how to “work” their friends by discovering their weaknesses. His father died before he had time to make provision for him in his will, and Bacon found himself practically penniless at the age of nineteen. His uncle Lord Burghley (William Cecil) was Lord Treasurer, and could easily have procured his nephew advancement; but he preferred to help his son Robert. Bacon became a lawyer. Then he decided to pay court to the Queen’s favourite, the accomplished and dashing Earl of Essex; with charm and flattery he had soon gained the earl’s friendship. Essex frequently gave him money – Bacon was a spendthrift – and tried hard to persuade the Queen to grant him various offices. When she passed over Bacon in favour of another candidate for Master of the Rolls, Essex soothed his protégé’s disappointment by presenting him with a large estate. In 1596 Essex captured Cadiz, and became one of the most popular men in England. But – to Bacon’s alarm – he began to overreach himself. After a
n unsuccessful expedition against the Irish, Essex was politically ruined. He tried to foment a rebellion, and was arrested and put on trial. Everyone recognized that he was guilty of hot temper rather than a desire to overthrow the Queen, and it seemed likely that his punishment would not be heavy. At this point Bacon betrayed his friend; he delivered a brilliant speech in which he accused Essex of treason, and declared that, “as a friend”, he knew Essex meant to seize the throne. Essex was sentenced to death and executed.
It is impossible to exonerate Bacon. He did it to gain favour with the Queen and further his own career; in return for sending Essex to his death he received twelve hundred pounds. But not the advancement he hoped for. Elizabeth distrusted him.
When Elizabeth died Bacon set out to flatter James I, and succeeded. He was knighted, and became Attorney-General in 1613. Five years later he finally reached the climax of his ambition, was ennobled and became Lord Chancellor. Three years later he was impeached for accepting bribes; he admitted his guilt and was banned from office and fined £40,000. He devoted the last five years of his life to writing.
Bacon is a baffling character, a strange mixture of greatness and pettiness. He was the most intelligent man of his time, and in some ways one of the nastiest. It would be difficult to conceive a character more totally unlike Shakespeare’s. The dramatist had genius; yet in a sense was not particularly intelligent. He wrote as naturally as a bird sings. The pessimism in which he frequently indulges is the pessimism of a child who has just lost a favourite toy, not the gloomy cynicism of the brilliant intellectual who despises his own craving for success. It is as impossible that Bacon could have written Shakespeare as that Schopenhauer could have written Alice in Wonderland.
Bacon was only the first of many candidates. In 1891 an archivist named James Greenstreet wrote a series of articles in The Genealogist suggesting that Shakespeare was the Earl of Derby, William Stanley. In 1599 a Jesuit spy had told a correspondent on the continent that the earl was not available to take part in a plot against the Queen because he was “busy in penning comedies for the common players”. Greenstreet died soon after publishing the articles, but the theory was revived fifteen years later by an American, Robert Frazer, in a book called The Silent Shakespeare. A later exponent of the theory, Professor Abel Lefranc, wrote four large volumes whose purpose was to prove that Shakespeare was thoroughly familiar with France and the French. He also pointed out that the plot of Measure for Measure was based on a real-life story from Paris in which there was a distinct similarity between the names of the characters and Shakespeare’s inventions.
The dramatist Christopher Marlowe was another candidate, advanced in 1895 in a novel called It Was Marlowe by a San Francisco attorney, William G. Ziegler. It was not taken seriously, but the theory was revived in 1955 by an American scholar, Calvin Hoffman, in The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare. Marlowe became famous with his first play, Tamburlaine, in 1587, when he was only twenty-three, and he probably collabourated with Shakespeare on Henry VI. In 1593 he was murdered in a quarrel about how much he owed towards a bill in a tavern; his murderer was acquitted. At the time of his murder Marlowe was in serious trouble; his fellow-playwright Thomas Kyd had been charged with atheism, and alleged that the papers found in his room actually belonged to Marlowe. Kyd was tortured but released, and seems to have died not long after. Marlowe had a powerful protector, Sir Thomas Walsingham, the cousin of the queen’s spy-master Sir Francis Walsingham. At the time of his death he was due to stand trial, and might well have been executed. Hoffman’s theory is that Marlowe was spirited away to Europe, and that another man was killed in his place and buried in his grave. And Marlowe went on to write the plays of Shakespeare. Hoffman’s chief argument is that an analytical method invented by Dr Thomas Corwin Meadenhall – it involves noting the average length (in letters) of an author’s words – demonstrated that Bacon could not have written Shakespeare, but that Marlowe could.
But once again a reading of the works of the two men reveals that they were quite different in character. One of the most basic differences was that Marlowe was homosexual, and Shakespeare was clearly not. The Shakespeare scholar Dr A.L. Rowse has pointed out that one major difference between the work of Marlowe and that of Shakespeare is that Shakespeare is fond of bawdy jokes and sexual double entendres, while Marlowe’s work shows the prudery that is often characteristic of homosexuals – the distaste for crude smut. This observation leaves Calvin Hoffman’s case with very little support.
Around 1914 an elementary schoolmaster named John Thomas Looney (an unfortunate name, but pronounced Loney) became convinced that the Stratford actor could not have written the plays, and began a systematic search for an Elizabethan who possessed the right qualifications. He deduced the character of the author from his work, then made a list of the basic requirements of such a person: he ended with a list of seventeen. By 1920 he had decided that only one man fitted the picture: Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. His book Shakespeare Identified is generally agreed to be as absorbing as a detective story, but his “unfortunate name” prevented it being taken seriously by the general public. (Other writers on the Shakespeare problem included S.E. Silliman, who supported Marlowe’s case, and George Battey, who believed Shakespeare was Daniel Defoe.) But although his book was soon forgotten, the theory was taken up by another American scholar, Charlton Ogburn, whose huge tome The Mysterious William Shakespeare (1984) is, in spite of its size, immensely readable. But although Ogburn argues convincingly that Oxford was a fine lyric poet who might well have written “Hark, hark the lark” and “Full fathom five”, he has an almost impossible task convincing the reader that late plays like A Winter’s Tale, Lear and The Tempest were written before 1604, the year Oxford died. Looney overcame that problem by suggesting that these plays were written by other people – Raleigh being the author of The Tempest and Fletcher of Henry VIII; Ogburn argues vigorously that they were all written much earlier than supposed; but his arguments will leave most people as unconvinced as Looney’s did.
One of the minor problems of Shakespeare scholarship is the identity of the lady called Anne Whateley, to whom, according to an entry in the Bishop of Worcester’s register, Shakespeare was due to be married in November 1582; a licence was issued to William Shakespeare just before his marriage to Anne Hathaway. “Whateley” could have been a slip of the pen on the part of the clerk, but surely he would not have written “of Temple Grafton” when he should have written “Shottery”? Says Sir Sidney Lee: “He was doubtless another of the numerous William Shakespeare’s who abounded in the diocese of Worcester”. This view is disputed by William Ross, a Scottish architect, who became convinced that Anne was the true author of Shakespeare’s plays. In The Story of Anne Whateley and William Shaxpere (1939), Ross tells a touching story of how in 1581 the seventeen-year-old Shakespeare, employed in his father’s business, called at a nunnery in Temple Grafton, near Stratford, and became acquainted with a nun called Anne Whateley, who fell in love with him. She began to write sonnets to him, the first of which began “From fairest creatures we desire increase”. But after she had given him thirty-two sonnets, the youth confessed that he was having a love affair with an older woman, Anne Hathaway, and in sonnet 33 she becomes the “basest cloud” that hides the face of the sun. When Anne Hathaway became pregnant Shakespeare experienced revulsion, and persuaded Anne Whateley to marry him; but the Hathaway family stepped in and took legal steps to force “Shaxpere” to marry Anne Hathaway. Anne is of course the “dark Lady”, for whom Anne Whateley began to experience a tormented, ambivalent kind of love. In fact, according to Ross, Anne Whateley eventually wrote about Shakespeare’s desertion – to London – from Anne Hathaway’s point of view, the result being A Lover’s Complaint, a triumph of identification of one woman with another.
But how did a girl who had spent most of her life in a nunnery become such an excellent craftsman? The answer, according to Ross, is that she was also the collabourator of
one of the major poets of the age, Edmund Spenser. Spenser met Anne Whateley about 1576, when Shakespeare was only twelve, and fell in love with her. Spenser’s first major poem, The Shephearde’s Calender, appeared three years later, and, according to Ross, “the surmise that she collabourated in it is not an improbable one”. And she then went on to write Spenser’s most celebrated work, The Faerie Queene. A few years later she also dashed off Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. In fact, “a perusal of the plays attributed to Marlowe makes it quite evident that their real author was Anne Whateley. These plays . . . were preliminary efforts, written when she was acquiring proficiency in the technique of the theatre. Her full achievement as a creative artist was reserved for Shakespeare alone.” The question of whether she was also responsible for the bawdy passages is not explored, but we may probably assume that these vulgar touches were added by the Stratford actor.
The reader of Anne Whateley and William Shaxpere may experience a sudden suspicion that the author is pulling his leg, and that the book is intended as a satire on the whole anti-Shakespeare industry. This would be unfounded. William Ross presented the present writer with a copy in 1963, when he was seventy-three, and it was perfectly clear from his accompanying letter that he was totally sincere, and that since publishing the book in 1939 he had been working assiduously on his theory and accumulating more evidence. And it was also clear that nothing would convince him that the different styles of The Faerie Queene, Hero and Leander and King Lear indicate the presence of three different authors.
This seems to be the major problem with most of the anti-Shakespearians. They examine the problem through a magnifying glass, and cannot see the wood for the trees. And most of them are so lacking in any faculty of literary criticism that they cannot tell a good poem from a bad one. Most of them can be highly convincing for a few pages at a time, but the whole argument is always less than the sum of its parts. Neither Bacon nor Derby nor Oxford nor Marlowe nor even Anne Whateley finally emerge as a more convincing candidate than the Stratford actor.